Harvard’s Claudine Gay is still refusing to resign – and it’s not just about antisemitism
December 28, 2023
We here at Accuracy in Media have pointed out that Harvard President Claudine Gay needs to go. It isn’t simply the antisemitism on campus — it’s the entire system that allows it to thrive that is at fault. As with the old saying, the fish rots from the head; this means that, at minimum, new leadership is required.
We are now no longer alone in this. Over this holiday period, more are coming to the same view. The New York Times and the Washington Post have run OpEds calling for her to go. Bill Ackman continues his sterling work with an interesting story. So far, it is a story, not a truth. It’s that Harvard has asked Gay to go, but she’s refusing to resign.
There’s also more background to this. As we’ve been saying, this isn’t purely about Gay, it’s the system. So, how did the system get this way? It was allowing DEI to become the focus of so much policy. The idea of diversity, that value of equity and so on, they’re just fine. But they quickly became corrupted into a certain type of diversity, more equity for some than others. At this point, DEI became another name for bias, even if it was a different form.
The problem gets worse, as Marc Andreessen says. This is because Harvard is seen as the pinnacle of American academia, and this has influenced the whole system. We’ll also only be able to root it out of the rest of the system if we start at the top with Harvard.
To repeat what the fundamental problem is: Free speech is a grand societal value. That’s why we have that First Amendment and all that. Universities, academia, they’re a part of that. That’s where we research, inculcate and transmit those societal values. So we need to have that free speech there.
The problem with current American academia is not that some students say things that are antisemitic. It’s that antisemitism is allowed in a way that a lot of other speech is not. The system does not allow free speech at all. That is, there is that which is politically approved and that which is not.
That is the rot, the cancer, that has to be excised. College will only work, as society will only work, when we really do have free speech and free inquiry, which is what we have to return to. So, we need to eliminate the current enforcers of the present bias.
Which is why Claudine Gay must go.